Is Amnesty International ignoring human rights of Hungarians?

The youth wing of the current ruling party in Hungary, FIDESZ, called Fidelitas, has called on Amnesty International to respond to its frequent requests to ensure Serbs stop beating ethnic Hungarians in ethnically-mixed Vojvodina Province.

The issue has become more relevant since beating to death of Ervin Blicki in the Vojvodina town of Bečej (Óbecse in Hungarian.) The ethnic Vovjodina Hungarian newspaper, Magyar Szó (Hungarian Word) reported the 17-year-old was attacked by four youths in „many cars”. None of the eyewitnesses are prepared to speak to the police, out of fear.

It is not unusual for police in such incidents to arrest and detain any ethnic Hungarians, as was the case of the „Boys of Temerin” in 2004, where five Hungarian-speaking boys allegedly assaulted a Serbian drug dealer. The drug dealer died and the boys were given what are considered draconian sentences by the court.

Numerous television and other news reports show that the Hungarian minority is thoroughly cowed and people are not prepared to speak on camera, or give their names for the most part, for fear of the Serb police.

The Budapest Times reported a demonstration by the Fidelitas youth group and quoted Amnesty’s Orsolya Jeney as saying:

”The organisation condemns as criminal all discrimination of minorities and hate-motivated acts.”

However, no statement of condemnation is to be found on AI’s Serbia website, but a call is made to end threats against journalists there. Meanwhile, a state secretary for Hungary’s National Policy Ministry, Zsuzsanna Répás, commenting on AI’s apparent silence, told Lánchíd Rádió :

”Well, the double standards that we experience from certain international and western organisations are very strange in Hungarian matters. Things of equal, or much more serious, weight that take place against Hungarians do not raise thei interest of these organisations, but when anything happens in Hungary they truly start into such a shouting-match that is unacceptable. We ask only that they should judge Hungarian issues as they judge the others.”

The secretary was referring to negative media reports in the European and occasionally, American press that referred to issues in Hungary in apocalyptic terms, such as a constitutional amendment being called the “End of Democracy”.